As a sector, e-commerce has doubled in size in the past five years. Consumer demand for instant direct-to-door delivery for nearly every item consumed or utilized in the home continues to fuel this growth, and there is no indication that this trend will reverse itself or stabilize. Although the increase has brought considerable benefits in terms of consumer convenience and satisfaction, the environmental impact of this trend cannot be ignored. Direct-to-door delivery is simply not as efficient as bulk delivery to a lesser number of discrete retail locations. Although individuals still need to transport themselves to and from their homes on the way to those retail locations, there is little evidence to support the assertion that carbon emissions are thereby decreased when the countervailing effect of an increased number of delivery trucks and routes are taken into account.
Regardless, it is inarguable that direct-to-door delivery is far worse from a sustainability perspective when the increased amount of packaging material is taken into account. Even if plastics and fill materials are neglected, the amount of material consumed just on the outer packaging is striking. The United States consumed 35.4 million tons of container grade cardboard material in 2014. Although a portion of this material is recycled, no recycling process is perfectly efficient in terms of the amount of material recovered, and the process itself consumes resource in the form of energy, chemicals, and capital equipment depreciation.
Reusable shipping containers are not generally considered viable alternatives to disposable shipping containers. The cost of moving the material back through the mail creates an obstacle for reuse, as does the fact that shipping an item wears away at the packaging material such that the packaging material must be durable if it is to be reused. Finally, the packaging material is generally bulky in that it is has a rigid structure around a cavity to protect the item it contains, where the cavity is hollow and unused when the packaging material is returned. This fact exacerbates the problems associated with shipping the item back to the original sender because shipping costs are strongly correlated with the volume of an object.